Female

Objectives: To test the hypotheses that older people and their informal carers are not disadvantaged by home-based rehabilitation (HBR) relative to day hospital rehabilitation (DHR) and that HBR is less costly.

Design: Two-arm randomised controlled trial.

Setting: Four trusts in England providing both HBR and DHR.

Participants: Clinical staff reviewed consecutive referrals to identify subjects who were potentially suitable for randomisation according to the defined inclusion criteria.

Interventions: Patients were randomised to receive either HBR or DHR.

There has been little work on the ethical issues facing non-professionals who care for relatives or others with dementia. A qualitative pilot study was conducted in ten such individuals, eight of them women, caring for persons drawn mainly from one general practice. The interviews indicated that many of the dilemmas faced by carers are ethical and that the issues differ from those faced by professionals. Ethical issues are sometimes the most troublesome matter for carers. Unlike issues for professionals, they arise from a personal context and are shaped by long-term relationships.

Worldwide people with dementia are usually cared for at home by informal carers who may themselves have poor health and/or live in social situations which intensify their needs. The scale of these needs continues to be underappreciated and they are exacerbated by the limited social, cultural and emotional resources that carers can draw upon. This paper looks at the disparities in support, and the complex negotiations made by carers, as they reconcile the everyday realities of informal care in the home.

To learn more about the needs and experiences of young carers for patients of frontotemporal dementia (FTD) in order to create a relevant support website for young caregivers to dementia patients.

Two focus groups were held with a total of fourteen young carers aged 11-18. The data corpus was collected through a semi-structured interview facilitated by a medical journalist who had prior experience as a caregiver to a patient with FTD. The transcripts were narrowed to a dataset for descriptive analysis using a coding scheme to reveal the main themes of their responses.

Aim.  To explore first-time primary caregivers’ experience of the way mental health nurses and other mental health clinicians respond to them as carers of young people with first-episode psychosis.

Background.  Caregivers have a key role in supporting family members/relatives with mental illness, but their contribution is undervalued frequently by mental health nurses and other mental health clinicians.

Design.  Qualitative interpretative phenomenological analysis.

Aim.  This paper presents findings from secondary analysis of longitudinal data on correlates of care relationship mutuality collected from 91 carers of people with Alzheimer’s disease and Parkinson’s disease in the control group of a randomized trial of home-care skill training.

Purpose: A trend exists towards moving from the hospital and caring for the patients with cancer at home, which has directed the burden of caring to the family. As a result the numbers of informal caregivers, who assumed the care of their loved ones, has increased rapidly. The aim of the study is to explore the ways that families use to cope with the stressors and hardships of caregiving and expand the knowledge about coping.

Background: Most persons with dementia in the Netherlands live at home, where they are cared for by informal carers such as family members or friends, who offer this care unpaid. Their care-task poses a high burden on these informal carers, increasing the risk of health problems and social isolation. Many informal carers indicate they want more information on the behaviour of those they care for.

Background: The well-being of informal carers of people with dementia is an important public health issue. Caring for an elderly relative with dementia may be burdensome and stressful, and can negatively affect the carer’s social, family, and professional life. The combination of loss, the physical demands of caregiving, prolonged distress, and biological vulnerabilities of older carers may compromise their physical health, increase social isolation, and increase the risk of anxiety and depressive disorders.

Background: Most studies of exercise training for heart failure have been conducted on relatively young patients with little comorbidity. Such programmes are unsuitable for the majority of older frail heart failure patients.

Aims: To test the acceptability and tolerability of an outpatient exercise programme in older heart failure patients with comorbid disease.